]]>We report from Chicago on how churches are responding to transgender people, especially as they become more and more visible in popular culture. At the Urban Village Church in Hyde Park, Rev. Emily McGinley’s ministry reaches out to transgender individuals.

]]>Watch more of our conversation with President Carter on women’s rights around the world. “There is no greater challenge than the full embrace of women’s equal rights by religious leaders,” says the former president.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: For some months, Pooja, a 22 year old mother of three, has been coming to this crisis counseling center in a lower middle class neighborhood of Delhi.

Pooja is trying to keep her family together. Her husband and in-laws—with whom she lived in the common tradition here—threw her out of the house. The problem: all three of her children are girls.

POOJA: The family says they need sons to carry on their name and since I have only three daughters, they tried to trick me into signing divorce papers so that their son could marry again. That led to some violence when I refused and I had to run away to my mother’s house for our safety.

DE SAM LAZARO: The preference for boy children dates back centuries—driven by religious custom.

RANJANA KUMARI (Center for Social Research): Only boys can look after the parents, they are the only ones who can perform the last rites. They are the only ones who will continue the family lineage. If all that is there then why will anybody wants to have a girl child? And also on the top of that you have to pay a dowry.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ranjani Kumari has studied the dowry system, which she says is mistakenly believed to have roots in Hindu scriptures.

KUMARI: This was never a practice anywhere prescribed but certainly it was said that when the princess goes, she must carry a number of horses because she’s used to a certain level of comfort, and so it is the duty of the king to insure the daughter is…and that gets distorted so that even the poorest of the poor who cannot afford two square meals will also have to buy things for the wedding of the daughter.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dowries were outlawed half a century ago but the system remains pervasive and adds a huge commercial dimension to marriage in India. With rising aspirations in a rapidly growing economy, sociologist Ravinder Kaur says daughters have become a financial liability.

RAVINDER KAUR (Indian Institute of Technology): They don’t want to pay dowries. They want to receive dowries. They want to give more education to the boys than to the girls, because for them, the boys are still more important.

DE SAM LAZARO: India’s census starkly bears out that bias. For every 1,000 male babies born, there are just 914 females—far fewer in some regions. In nature, the numbers are about equal. The gap began to widen in the 1990s with the advent of ultrasonography, allowing early detection of a fetus’ sex. That’s been blamed for the widespread abortion of female fetuses.

(from 2001 footage): So this is your clinic?

Dr. Kakodkar: (from 2001 footage) Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Abortion is legal in India but it is illegal when done for sex selection. However, tracking the intent is almost impossible as gynecologist Prakash Kakodkar admitted with startling candor in a story I reported in 2001. He does them routinely.

(to Dr. Kakodkar): So you freely admit that you do, basically, contravene the law. I mean…

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR: Yes, most of us do, I would say. I wouldn’t deny that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Do you face any legal sanctions?

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR: No, that’s what I said: there is no legal sanction because there is nothing on paper. I mean, who can ask you?

DE SAM LAZARO: The lopsided sex ratio has only spread in recent years. Two decades ago it was mainly in the northern farm states, where many families were entering the middle class thanks to India’s green revolution. Now Kaur says it’s in areas where a new middle class is emerging.

KAUR: Places like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, which are becoming more prosperous where there will be greater availability of technology and more incomes in the hands of families, they will tend to shape the family and sex select.

DE SAM LAZARO: As these areas become more affluent, fertility rates—the number of children born per woman—are declining. That’s welcomed by people concerned about population growth. These are some of India’s most densely populated regions. But when it comes to gender balance, it’s not good news, Professor Kaur says.

KAUR: You know when you want a smaller family, then the squeeze is on the girls because interestingly, suppose you’re moving from a fertility rate of four, to three. Then you want two boys and one girl. So if a lot of families in populous states want two boys and one girl, then obviously there’s going to be a great excess of boys.

DE SAM LAZARO: She says the social consequences of this demographic shift are already visible in those northern farm states, where there’s a growing shortage of brides.

KAUR: And as a result, men in these states have been importing brides from let’s say the east of India, the south of India, they’re sort of going shopping for brides wherever they can and many people call it “bride trafficking.”

DE SAM LAZARO: These marriages across India’s diverse cultural landscape can be fraught with social complication. But at the same time, Kaur sees an ever so slight improvement in the gender ratio in those states that saw early prosperity.

KAUR: Once people reach the higher realms of the middle class, which are called the stable middle class, they don’t sex select. Then they tend to view girls and boys as being of equal value. So they don’t really care whether they have two girls, whether they have one girl, one boy, etcetera.

DE SAM LAZARO: But for many years, India will present a patchwork of progress—a worsening gender balance in many places, slight improvement in some. The Center for Social Research’s Kumari sees one more positive development that’s a consequence of India’s growing and urbanizing middle class: more girls are going to school.

RANJANA KUMARI: As I said, India is full of contradictions. On the one side you see women in the villages still very disempowered but on the other side there is a brighter picture. We have the largest number of doctors, lawyers, professionals, our education level is going up for the girls. When you look at the new economy girls have got lot of new opportunities, you know, media, IT industry banking, entertainment. Whichever sector you see, women are filling the ranks in a very major way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Counseling center client Pooja never set foot in a school but she wants an education for her daughters. And that’s why she says she needs her husband’s help to provide it.

POOJA: Women are progressing more in society and I need the support of their father so that they can grow up in a proper family, so that they can get a good education, so that they can grow up and have good marriages.

DE SAM LAZARO: She’ll have an uphill battle—socially if not legally—to provide daughters with the family structure she calls ideal. But she says the best dowry her daughters could have is an education.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in New Delhi.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: At a Los Angeles ceremony, a group of Catholic women is about to commit an act of religious faith, but because they are women it’s an act the Vatican has condemned as a grave crime against the Roman Catholic Church and what the church sees as its divine laws.

“Bishop Olivia and members of the community, I am honored to testify on behalf of Jennifer’s readiness to be ordained to the priesthood.”

GONZALEZ: In a faith that prohibits females from becoming priests, these women are rebels, gathering here this afternoon to ordain this woman, Jennifer O’Malley, as a Catholic priest.

(to Jennifer O’Malley): Do you love the Catholic Church?

JENNIFER O’MALLEY: I do. It’s who I am, so I can’t leave. You know, I’ve gone to other churches and they’re beautiful, but I’m Catholic, and I can’t separate myself from that.

GONZALEZ: O’Malley is a member of a group called Roman Catholic Women Priests. It was started in 2002 when seven women, in an act of defiance against the Vatican, were ordained as priests by a male bishop in Europe. Ever since, the group’s been fighting for full acceptance of women into the priesthood. In the last decade, Roman Catholic Women Priests has ordained more than 100 women in ceremonies similar to this one for Jennifer O’Malley.

“We choose you our sister Jennifer for the order of priesthood. Thanks be to God.”

GONZALEZ: The ordinations are held in non-Catholic churches and definitely without the sanction or recognition of the Catholic Church. In fact, under Vatican policy O’Malley’s ordination, like the women who have done this before her, brings automatic excommunication. That means she’s barred from receiving the church’s sacraments or participating in the liturgy, unless she repents.

O’MALLEY: You know, in a sense it’s hurtful, and the fact that I’m being excommunicated by people who don’t even know me. But on the other hand, again, it is a consequence of doing what God has called me to do.

GONZALEZ: And your response to those who think at worst this is heresy, out and out, and at best some sort of a stunt, really. What do you say to them?

O’MALLEY: You know, it’s a call from God, and I believe it to be a true call, so those other things have to be put aside. And if that means breaking a law within the church, I know within myself, within my intellect and emotionally, that it is the right thing to do.

GONZALEZ: Catholic leaders, of course, see the ordination of women very differently.

REV. THOMAS RAUSCH (Professor of Catholic Theology, Loyola Marymount University): The Catholic Church is not ready for the ordination of women right now.

GONZALEZ: Father Thomas Rausch is a priest and professor of Catholic theology at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University.

RAUSCH: As far as the church is concerned, these are not valid ordinations. Ordination is an act of the whole church, and this is not an act of the whole church. In a sense, this is an act against the communion of the whole church. It is very difficult to call yourself a Roman Catholic if you are not living in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and communion means you are recognized by the bishop and you have this network of relationships, which is…It’s the kind of glue that holds the Catholic Church together

GONZALEZ: The theological justification most often cited for barring women from the Catholic priesthood goes back to Jesus’ choice of men only to be his disciples. That was followed by centuries of male-dominated customs developed within the church.

RAUSCH: I think that, you know, the culture was patriarchal. It was very much male-centered. Males were educated. They took roles of leadership. They played leading roles in the churches. So I think those cultural reasons really have to be taken into account in order to understand the exclusion of women from ordained ministry in the life of the church.

GONZALEZ: Although there was talk about the possible ordination of women in the wake of Vatican II 50 years ago, in re cent decades the church has taken a tougher stand against the idea of women in the priesthood. In 2008, the Vatican formally declared its policy of excommunication of women who completed ordination. That was followed two years later by the listing of the ordination of women as a “grave crime” against Catholic sacramental law. The church says it’s taken these steps to maintain theological purity and centuries of Catholic tradition and unity. Many who favor the ordination of women, though, say sexism and chauvinism are the real reasons women are barred from the Catholic priesthood.

JANE VIA: When I chose to get ordained, it was because I feel that intelligent, articulate women must act to try to change the church.

GONZALEZ: Jane Via is a Catholic woman priest in San Diego.

VIA: I realized there are no clergymen who are going to stand up to this authoritarian, totalitarian, patriarchal, sexist system, because they have too much invested.

GONZALEZ: Via is one the most prominent figures in the women Catholic priests movement; partly that’s because of her unusual background. Along with having a PhD in theology, Via was also an assistant district attorney in San Diego for over 25 years. That courtroom experience, she says, has helped her in her present conflict with the leaders of the Catholic Church. Via says the evidence she’s gathered shows women had a prominent role in the early church.

VIA: There no are no scriptural barriers to the ordination of women, and the first 300-400 years of the early church I believe the evidence shows clearly included the ordination of women as deacons, the ordination of women as priests, and the ordination of women as bishops.

“Let us pray.”

GONZALEZ: Via leads a congregation in San Diego, with masses held in a borrowed Lutheran church.

Via blessing child: “Giles, God bless you and keep you…”

GONZALEZ: Although worship services here aren’t recognized by the local Catholic archdiocese, Via carries out all of the typical duties of a male priest. The people who attend mass here say that despite this congregation’s outsider status within the Catholic Church, they’re secure in their own religious identities.

(to congregants) How do you identify yourself? What’s your faith?

Group of congregants: Roman Catholic.

(to congregant): What would you say to your fellow Catholics watching this who look at this and see a woman as priest and say that just isn’t real, and the mass you’ve gone to has no legitimacy.

Congregant: For me it is real. It’s as real as a male priest standing there. What’s the difference? Just because one is a woman and one is a man? I don’t think God distinguishes.

GONZALEZ: But Via acknowledges that her battle with the Catholic Church has cost her, from broken friendships to the pain of excommunication.

VIA: I remember being really grieved about not being able to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. That was sort of the ultimate exclusion. You can’t take the sacraments. I knew I would be excommunicated so I knew I could not accept the sacraments in a canonical Catholic church anymore, unless I was unknown to the population there, which is hard for me to be in San Diego.

GONZALEZ: What do you say to those who would say join another community of faith, join another faith, become something else, but don’t stay in the Catholic Church with your views. You would say what?

VIA: For me to just turn my back on this institution and say, “You’re all a bunch of worthless idiots, and I’m not participating anymore. I’m going to do my own thing. I’m going to go be Episcopalian and I can be a priest there” is completely irresponsible. This is my community. If everyone who is progressive-minded, progressive thinking, and willing to stand up to the Vatican leaves the church, the church will never change.

O’MALLEY (at altar): “…and for this we always thank and praise you.”

Ceremony: “We join with the saints of all times and places as they sing forever to your glory.”

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the hardening position of the church against their movement and its ordinations, the women Catholic priests say they aren’t retreating. They say they believe that although they might not see it in their own lifetimes, women will one day be allowed to become Roman Catholic priests—and with the support and blessings of the Vatican.

KIM LAWTON: Graduation day at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This multi-denominational Christian institution describes itself as “progressive and evangelistic,” and its stated vision is that graduates will change the world by practicing their theological vocations. That vision explicitly includes women, such as Itang Young. Young grew up in Houston. She says she never saw herself becoming a pastor or religious leader.

ITANG YOUNG: The leadership roles in church were typically held by men, and the women who did work in the church were either Sunday school teachers or they worked in the kitchen or they worked in the nursery. Very rarely was there a woman in the pulpit.

LAWTON: Young became an engineer and took on a high-powered corporate job. Then, she started questioning the purpose of her life.

YOUNG: I needed to do something to help improve the lives of the people around me.

LAWTON: She concluded that seminary would help her get there, and at Union, she found a place especially open to female students.

Nationally, women make up about one-third of all seminary students. But here at Union Theological Seminary, they’re more than 50 percent of the student body. Women have been coming here for 100 years, but as recently as the 1960s, more than 90 percent of the students here were men.

PRESIDENT SERENE JONES: I think right now at this moment in history we’re in the midst of something of the magnitude of the Protestant reformation.

LAWTON: Serene Jones is Union’s first female president. She believes the rate at which women are entering theology and ministry is one of the biggest changes in 2,000 years of Christianity.

JONES: There are communities in this country in which if a woman says she wants to be a minister, she’s not going to be looked at like she’s stark raving mad. To have a situation in which we recognize the fullness of life of women, the full equality of women changes everything.

LAWTON: Women with seminary degrees are becoming ordained pastors. But they are also becoming chaplains, social workers, counselors, authors, scholars and professors. Despite the new opportunities, limitations do remain, even in denominations that support female leadership.

JONES: The number of women from Union and the number of women in this country who are the senior leaders of large congregations is so miniscule, and it still is sort of the, what they refer to as the stained glass ceiling. You can only go so far.

LAWTON: Jones says the challenges can be subtle.

JONES: There are obstacles I think in the church, of people who don’t even know they have a prejudice against women. But they’ll say things like, “You know, she just, I just, I can’t hear her voice in the back of the sanctuary. I want a minister who can talk loud.” Or “You know, she just looks a little too awkward in the pulpit.”

LAWTON: Then, there are more overt limitations. The Roman Catholic Church and certain evangelical denominations oppose female ordination.

PROFESSOR JANET WALTON: I am a Roman Catholic woman. I have no place at this table. This table is for men.

LAWTON: Janet Walton is a Roman Catholic nun who has been professor of worship at Union since 1981. She’s one of several Catholic women on the faculty here.

PROF. WALTON: It’s very difficult for me to imagine that millions of Catholics never experience a woman leading the liturgy. Because I think it matters. It’s not essentially that I think it makes a difference whether a woman or a man does it, but that no women can do it is a very big problem in the Catholic Church.

LAWTON: Part of how it matters, she argues, is in portraying a fuller vision of faith.

PROF. WALTON: There are lots of ways in which the, being a woman and having the experiences that go with being a woman do affect the way one understands God.

BARBARA RICE: It’s not just about having the same place as men in ministry. I mean, certainly we need all those same rights and need access to as many of those positions, absolutely, and equal pay, for sure, but it’s also about bringing all of our uniqueness as women into those positions. We have gifts. We have gifts that are uniquely women gifts and that those don’t get checked at the door

RICE: What is sacred?

LAWTON: Barbara Rice is a second-year masters of divinity student who says she has wanted to be in ministry her entire life. She grew up in a conservative evangelical church in North Carolina, and as a woman and a lesbian, she felt her opportunities for ministry were restricted. But she believes women have much to contribute.

RICE: We have an ability to listen to our intuition. And I think, as far as spiritual matters go, that that’s incredibly important. Whether that’s the way we’re socialized or whatever it is I think that we tend to have a sense of things, that if we can learn to trust it, especially with the discernment of a community, it can be a really spiritually enlivening thing.

LAWTON: Jones believes women bring to theology what she calls a sense of spirituality wedded to the ordinary.

JONES: It’s about breaking bread and putting on Band-Aids on a skinned knee, and about being angry and standing up for justice in a community. Those aren’t things that men don’t do, because they do. It’s just that women somehow bear that in their souls with a depth and a persistence that brings freshness to ministry.

CHARLENE SINCLAIR: The journey for women has been a journey that’s been so difficult so that when they finally are able to step on this path, there’s a level of just like deep joy and gratitude.

LAWTON: For Charlene Sinclair, a 4th year PhD student, seminary has been a way to enhance her work as a community organizer.

SINCLAIR: Seminary actually not only gave me permission to engage my head in this process, but showed me that engaging my head was critical so that I wouldn’t be a reactionary pastor or a reactionary spiritual person, but I can do it out of a place of, not just deep love, but deep, thoughtful love.

LAWTON: Jones found her own passion for theology early on.

JONES: Studying theology, reading Augustine and Calvin and learning about scripture and reading about women’s leadership, it was like eating chocolate all day long. It was so delicious. And that’s when I, when I stumbled into that world I realized I’d found my home.

LAWTON: She grew up in the Disciples of Christ denomination and says her family encouraged her to pursue that passion.

JONES: The struggle along the way was, it’s one thing to imagine yourself doing something and it’s another thing in the broader world to have this, the confidence and the strength to believe you actually can do it.

LAWTON: Jones says it’s important for women to have role models and people to encourage them. She mentors younger women. And, she says, men can also play an important role.

JONES: As women go into the ministry it’s often going to be men that are their biggest supporters. It’s not just women that are out there cheering and you know, giving sustenance.

LAWTON: Itang Young says her time at seminary vastly expanded her vision of how God may use her in ministry. She says it’s actually not all that different from her work as an engineer.

YOUNG: As an engineer, we build things better. We deconstruct and reconstruct items, objects, in a way that helps to improve the lives of other people. And within a ministerial context, the function is the same. We’re doing church in a new way. We are building God’s people. So I went from building things to helping build God’s people.

LAWTON: For now, Young is still deciding whether or not she’ll pursue ordination. She’s not at all worried that as a woman, her ministry options may be limited.

YOUNG: There’s one thing that I learned here at Union that is to create opportunities where none exist. So if there’s not a position available, market yourself and perhaps one could open. The word of God says that your gifts will make room for you, and I believe that.

LAWTON: Jones says that’s the vision she has for all her students.

JONES: If you can come to believe that God wants you to succeed and flourish and lead, that’s unstoppable.

]]>“There is a whole historical world of women who have risen as leaders in religious communities because they were called to do it, not because someone said they could,” according to the first woman president of Union Theological Seminary. Watch additional excerpts of correspondent Kim Lawton’s interview with Serene Jones on women in theology and ministry.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: A special report now from India on the religious and ethical issue of aborting female fetuses. In India, sex selection by sonogram is officially illegal, but widely practiced. And there is no Hindu or legal prohibition on abortion. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: This group home operated by a Hindu organization in New Delhi offers a safe haven from the city streets, where these children were abandoned. The sex ratio here — 37 girls, two boys — says a great deal about how girls are viewed in India.

DE SAM LAZARO: The root of the problem is ancient and economic. Male children are favored since they carry the family name and frequently get the family inheritance. Girls are viewed as liabilities, who will cost their parents a dowry when they marry and move into their husband’s homes in the Indian tradition.

DR. PURI: People feel that bringing up a daughter is like watering a plant in someone else’s house, because here they’re going to educate her, nurture her, spend money on her; ultimately she’s going to [be] married and going to somebody else, so what’s the worth of that?

DE SAM LAZARO: Years of campaigns and laws have failed to eradicate India’s dowry tradition, which cuts across all religions. The result is a history of female infanticide, and in recent years, abortion. Dr. Sharada Jain, a Delhi gynecologist, says about five million pregnancies were terminated last year, after parents found out they were expecting a female child.

DR. SHARADA JAIN (Gynecologist): Five million is a big number. And we activists feel it is only the tip of the iceberg. You interview anybody in my clinic. If she has had a girl child before, you can know it for sure that she has had a sex determination [test] somewhere else, and now it is a male child. That’s why she is carrying through with the pregnancy. As simple as that.

DE SAM LAZARO (to Dr. Jain): Do you see patients who have two girls in a row?

DR. JAIN: Yes, but the percentage is very small. I would say 10 percent.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, ultrasonography, one of the most beneficial diagnostic tools used to monitor fetal health, is widely misused in sex determination, leading to abortion. Ultrasound clinics are available is many places that barely have electricity.

The town of Palwal, about an hour and a half north of Delhi, has about 40,000 residents — small by India’s standards. Yet it has no fewer than 24 ultrasound machines. Not coincidentally, the population of Haryana, the province, has one of the most lopsided gender ratios: 830 females for every 1,000 males.

Normally, scientists say the sex ratio is about even, with slightly more females than males. This means that in India, nearly one in five female fetuses is aborted in parts of India — nearly one in 10 nationally.

This woman, a mother of three girls and pregnant again, is desperate for a son.

DR. SUDHIR SUBHANI (Radiologist): She was complaining about abdominal pain, so that is why we have done the scan.

Radiologist Sudhir Subhani said the cause of this patient’s pain became quickly evident: a twin pregnancy.

DE SAM LAZARO (to Dr. Subhani): Is it good news for her or bad?

DR. SUBHANI: It’s good news and bad news. She’s expecting one boy and one girl.

DE SAM LAZARO: You couldn’t tell her that?

DR. SUBHANI: No. She wanted to know, but I just told her that she had twins.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Subhani told us, but at least by law, could not reveal the sex to the mother. In fact, in 1994 the Indian government outlawed sonograms for sex determination. Problem is, in a country where abortion is legal and widespread, the law has been difficult to implement. One thing it has done is raised the price of sex determination [tests].

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR (Gynecologist): Because the procedure is illegal and once you tell that to the patient, the patient doesn’t have any argument at all. If it was a legal procedure, then the patient would be able to bargain with you for such a procedure.

DE SAM LAZARO: Bombay gynecologist Grakash Kakodkar admits he’s a participant in a widely corrupt system. In principle, Kakodkar supports sex determination and abortions only when there’s a history of hereditary disease among males in a family.

DR. KAKODKAR: From the point of just sex determination, to terminate a female pregnancy, I am not in favor of it.

DE SAM LAZARO (to Dr. Kakodkar): But do you do it occasionally when requested to?

DR. KAKODKAR: Ya… ya… I do. I cannot deny that. Although whatever people say that they don’t do it, I still feel the majority of obstetricians are still doing it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Do you face any legal sanction for doing that?

DR. KAKODKAR: No, that’s what I said, there is no legal sanction because there is nothing on paper.

DE SAM LAZARO: Kakodkar says he does take into account the patient’s personal situation. Frequently, they’re under social and economic pressure, especially if they already have a female child or two. At the same time, he admits, business is so lucrative for the doctor, it quickly overcomes any ethical reservations.

DR. KAKODKAR: Initially, you feel a little bad, you know, for having terminated an un-indicated pregnancy, but subsequently I feel one loses that; it doesn’t bite your conscience that much. Let me be absolutely frank.

DE SAM LAZARO: You are being quite frank, in fact, much more than I expected.

DR. KAKODKAR: I’m saying it very, very frankly.

DE SAM LAZARO: And, terminations are the chief source of your income?

DR. KAKODKAR: Very much.

DE SAM LAZARO: Much more than delivering babies?

DR. KAKODKAR: Very much, very much. And if you don’t do it, somebody else will, because the patient is hell bent on having it done.

DR. JAIN: The doctors feel the government works so slow that nobody can touch them and that’s why the fear complex is not there. If one or two are caught and the media publicizes it, something can be done, [but] I don’t think there is political will.

DE SAM LAZARO: There does appear to be judicial will. Early in May, India’s Supreme Court ordered the government to step up its enforcement of the anti-sex determination law—something that even Dr. Kakodkar supports. So long as it’s properly implemented, he says.

DR. KAKODKAR: If it is done uniformly—everybody’s not going to do it—then it is a different story. So unless the government really puts its foot down and decides to act really tough with people who are doing this—I [am] doing this—I don’t think there is any way to curb the procedure.

DE SAM LAZARO: Kakodkar says doctors should be required to register all abortions done in the second trimester, when the sex of a fetus becomes readily discernable, and cite a reason why the termination was requested. That could dissuade many from engaging in sex determination procedures. Or it could simply raise the price for them even higher.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in Mumbai, India.